Points of View in Panofsky s Early Theoretical Essays

Chapter One Points of View in Panofsky s Early Theoretical Essays This love of the diagrammatic, this pleasure taken in an image of the general principle swooping down on the powerless, aimless, feckless particular and gathering it up into the stark clarity of a demonstration of the inner workings of the law, this is the frisson that reflection on the cognitive event produced in the first half of this [twentieth] century. Rosalind Krauss Rosalind Krauss describes a general modernist enchantment, a fascination with the diagrammatic, the general principle, and the law. The specific focus of her passage is the critic Clement Greenberg s satisfaction with Loran s bizarre graphs of Cézanne s pictures in which the bodies of Madame Cézanne or of the gardener sitting with folded arms are drained of everything but a set of their now brutishly definitive silhouettes, traced for them by Loran s own hand, each element notched in turn into the overall diagram of the picture plotted by means of the same myopic contour (see fig. 1). Greenberg, in 1945, was not bothered by Loran s presentation of the work stripped bare, of the bluntness or bloodlessness of his demonstration. Instead, Krauss contends, for Greenberg these diagrams constituted simply a series of images of the logical moment, that instance of coalescence which happens in no time at all of a separate set of facts into a virtual unity. 1 In the first decades of the last century, particularly in Germany and Austria, the field of art history was coalescing into a scientific, or systematic, discipline (Kunstwissenschaft). 2 Scientific art history was preoccupied with logical order and unity those masterstrokes of methodological legerdemain capable of turning unwieldy, irrational works of art into knowable objects of systematic analysis. Like Loran s diagrams 12

Panofsky s Early Theoretical Essays 13 1. Erle Loran, diagram, ca. 1963. From Loran, Cézanne s Compositions: Analysis of His Form, With Diagrams and Photographs of his Motifs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). Reproduced by permission of the Regents of the University of California.

14 Chapter 1 and Greenberg s satisfaction with them, Erwin Panofsky s (1892 1968) early theoretical essays aim for the logical moment the moment when aesthetic phenomena are arrested and arrayed in a unified field of inquiry. In this sense, Panofsky s early essays move to the rhythms of disciplinarity. As John Michael Krois reminds us, every field of study, no matter how particular its objects, aims to relate particular occurrences to a general form or structure. 3 Indeed, the articulation of a discipline rests on its forms of relation: the more unified and logical the forms of relation, the more coherent the field of study. In his essay of 1915, The Problem of Style in the Visual Arts ( Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst ), Panofsky informs us that art is not only based on a particular perception of the world [Anschauung der Welt] but also on a particular worldview [Weltanschauung]. 4 Here the author parlays the connotations of Anschauung into a subtle demonstration. Variously defined as view, experience, perception, idea, and concept, the German word traps within its linguistic net the interplay between seeing and meaning that forms the basis of Panofsky s definition of art. Art, according to Panofsky, is based on perception and the intellectual views and postulates we bring to it. The same might be said of art history, and it should come as no surprise that Panofsky writes from the point of view of the art historian. After all, negotiating the interplay between seeing and meaning, art and history, with the aim of establishing a systematic discipline was something Panofsky shared with other practitioners of early twentieth-century German art history. 5 Writing in 1910, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer described the highest criterion of science as unity and completeness in the systematic construction of experience. 6 In the early years of the twentieth century, scientific art history oriented itself toward this very standard. Like Cassirer s contemporaneous investigations in the philosophy of science, Panofsky s desire to determine the underlying concepts and principles of art history was in step with the neo-kantian turn in German philosophy. 7 The neo-kantian movement arose in reaction to the supposed theoretical deficiencies of Hegelian speculation. In its attempt to grasp all of human knowledge in one swoop, in a total system from the top down, Hegelian philosophy had left the specific bases of knowledge unexamined. 8 Returning to Kant was to return to a method of critical inquiry most suitable for the determination of the bases of knowledge of the academic disciplines. Abandoning grand, Hegelian-inspired speculations on the movement of spirit or culture over time, the theorist s turn to Kant was, in the field of art history, also a turn toward the work of art. Inspired by Kant s critical method, Panofsky s early essays theorize the possibility of a priori concepts and principles for art history, those con-

Panofsky s Early Theoretical Essays 15 cepts that would account for the nature of art itself and those principles that would orient artistic phenomena within a unified conceptual field. In doing so, these essays address the question, what is art? at the same time as they investigate the possibility of a systematic art history. Determining fundamental concepts and principles would not only provide the systematicity required for a discipline of art history but would also establish the distinctiveness of art history as a historical science. 9 The scientific revolution in German art history aimed to move beyond the consideration of art as merely an aesthetic phenomenon. As Edgar Wind remarked in 1924, the trouble with the aesthetic phenomenon is that it has no other meaning than its own. It is isolated, it is indivisible, and it is self-sufficient. Consequently, it can be neither wrong nor right. It is simply there. 10 Rather than subjecting the aesthetic phenomenon to a systematic inquiry, the aesthetic point of view offered an individual judgment of taste, a love of beauty for its own sake rather than any understanding of the conditions of the appearance of historical beauty. In this way, the aesthetic point of view enabled aesthetic phenomena to remain isolated and self-sufficient simply there. 11 If the sensuous experience of aesthetic phenomena offered merely an aggregate of individual experiences of specific objects, it was thought that a systematic art history could offer reasoned judgment of historical works of art along with a clear understanding of the system of knowledge to which these objects belonged. Put differently, systematic art history sought to transform the chaos of aesthetic phenomena into the cosmos of a unified disciplinary structure. Panofsky recognized that the work of art always has aesthetic significance, and he believed that attentive looking should lead to an engagement with art-historical problems. 12 Formulating his art history alongside advocates of empathy theory and psychological aesthetics, he was keen to ward off the incursions of modern aesthetics into scientific art history. 13 Correlating aesthetic phenomena with a system of historical sequence was one thing, adequately describing the nature of art was another. Aesthetic phenomena, in other words, offered special challenges for art history, as Panofsky discovered when he sought to provide the inherent laws and to preserve the unique value of the academic study of art. 14 In The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline, an essay of 1940, Panofsky asks the central question: How, then, is it possible to build up art history as a respectable scholarly discipline, if its objects come into being by an irrational and subjective process? While works of art are clearly distinct from the objects of scientific investigation, both the humanist and the scientist rely on theory, or hypothesis, to conjecture a system that makes sense for their respective objects. Hence, what is true of the re-

16 Chapter 1 lationship between monuments, documents and a general historical concept in the humanities is evidently equally true of the relationship between phenomena, instruments and theory in the natural sciences. To grasp reality, Panofsky continues, we have to detach ourselves from the present. Philosophy and mathematics do this by building systems in a medium that is by definition not subject to time. Natural science and the humanities do it by creating those spatio-temporal structures which I have called the cosmos of nature and the cosmos of culture. 15 In a speech delivered in 1945 to the Institute for Advanced Study, Panofsky comments further on the intersections between the humanist and the scientist: There are, after all, problems so general that they affect all human efforts to transform chaos into cosmos, however much these efforts may differ in subject matter. The humanist, too, finds himself faced once he attempts to think about what he is doing with such questions as: the changing significance of spatial and temporal data within different frames of reference; the delicate relationship between the phenomenon and the instrument (which, in the case of the humanist, is represented by the document ); the continuous and/or discontinuous structure of the processes which we lightheartedly call historical evolution. 16 The stations of Panofsky s art-historical methodology demonstrate his thinking about what he was doing: the changing significance of spatial and temporal data within different frames of reference is studied in his 1927 Perspective as Symbolic Form; 17 the delicate relationship between the phenomenon and... the document finds its fullest articulation in the iconographic method; finally, the structure of the processes that enable historical evolution might be suggested in the underlying laws of the discipline of art history itself. The search for such intrinsic principles animates Panofsky s early theoretical essays. Turning from the strict observation of nature or culture toward speculation on their objects of study, the scientist and the humanist transcend their separate scholarly domains and join on a common plane of thought. This shift from the empirical to the objective point of view also marks the arrival of theory what Panofsky describes as the thinking about what one is doing. Theory enables the scientist and the humanist to consider the object within a more speculative frame of reference; theory facilitates the creation and activation of fields of inquiry. Art history is theoretical in a double sense: first, after close observation and thoughtful study the art historian must interpret aesthetic objects that do not subscribe to natural laws; second, transforming an aggregate of aesthetic phenomena into a

Panofsky s Early Theoretical Essays 17 scholarly discipline requires a theoretical point of view onto the field of the visual arts. Art history is a curious discipline. Consisting of a domain of aesthetic objects, art history requires the close observation and study of images that by their very nature can never be known in the objective sense toward which science strives, as well as the classification of these objects into categories and contexts that structurally speaking resemble those of the natural sciences. 18 If the goal of the sciences is knowledge, then, as Panofsky rightly states, that of the humanities must be wisdom. 19 Conceding knowledge to science does not leave art history in the lurch of relativism, however. The methods employed by the art historian guide research toward reasonable ends. In this way, art history can be built up as a respectable scholarly discipline though its very objects come into being by an irrational, subjective process. 20 How does an ultimately unknowable aesthetic phenomenon become an object of disciplinary knowledge? In what follows I reflect on points of view in art history, on what enables the turn from chaos to cosmos. To this end I will consider seeing, representing, and knowing. Each term of this triad can be correlated with a point of view: the term seeing describes the perception of an object, or the empirical point of view; representing implies the shift from the perception of an object to Anschauung, the mental image or representation of the perceptible object, and, correspondingly, an objective viewpoint; 21 finally, knowing refers to the epistemological or transcendental vantage point, wherein one moves beyond the mental representation of an object toward speculation on that object within a broad field of inquiry. Examples of this last point of view include the search for the fundamental laws of perceptual phenomena or the initial classification of these phenomena into schemes and systems. Encompassing internal and external vantage points within its purview, theory enables the movement from seeing to representing to knowing. As theory ushers our perceptions into thoughts, and finally into knowledge, so does it lead us from sight to insight, from the particular instance to the general category. 22 In this way, the transition from seeing to representing to knowing describes the movement of disciplinarity in the visual arts. Pace Panofsky, we might want to consider wisdom rather than knowledge as the appropriate term for the purpose of the history of art as a humanistic discipline, since art history trades in aesthetic objects. Yet art history is predicated on the transformation of aesthetic phenomena into knowable objects, if not objects of knowledge. Written in the years before Panofsky s own depiction of the aim of scientific method to transform chaos into cosmos, Cassirer s 1910 study

18 Chapter 1 Substance and Function describes the outlines of this pursuit with a similar use of metaphor. The aggregate of sensuous things must be related to a system of necessary concepts and laws, and brought to unity in this relation. This process of thought, however, demands really more than the mere combination and transformation of parts and presentations; it presupposes an independent and constructive activity, as is most clearly manifest in the creation of limiting structures. The empiricist also must accept this form of idealization; for, without it, the world of perception would not be merely a mosaic but a true chaos. 23 Likening the data of sense perception to an aggregate of sensuous things, Cassirer explains how the move from aggregate to system necessitates an active process that transports what is given into a new logical sphere. 24 As one shuttles between the empirical, the objective, and the transcendental points of view in this active process, fixed properties are replaced by the intellectual abbreviations of empirical or hypothetical concepts. Concepts, Cassirer explains, do not copy a given manifold abstractly and schematically. Instead, and more powerfully, concepts constitute a new law of relation and thus produce a new and unique connection of the manifold. 25 Empirical concepts gather sensuous particulars into serial relations by permitting one to find uniformity in the aggregate of sensuous experience; hypothetical concepts, in turn, allow one to conjecture necessary connections within logical systems. Whereas empirical concepts are forms of representation of the world of sensuous experience, hypothetical concepts mark the flight into the realm of pure speculation. In hypothesis, a whole is substituted for the part fixed properties are replaced by concepts or universal principles in an active process that necessitates the negotiation of two points of view. As in the story of Thales, Cassirer makes clear in his elegant study that a vantage point on the concrete and the abstract is necessary for the building up of scientific knowledge. 26 If concepts provide the mechanism necessary for transforming sensuous particulars into unchanging objects of experience, judgment motivates the transformation from seeing to representing to knowing by ordering aesthetic phenomena under the empirical, the objective, and the transcendental points of view. Moving from the empirical to the objective point of view, judgment provides the organizing concepts that connect individual objects into serial relations. The transcendental vantage point of judgment allows one to move beyond the object and hypothesize about the meaning and correlation of objects in a unified field of inquiry. Fol-

Panofsky s Early Theoretical Essays 19 lowing Kant, Cassirer describes how judgment brings knowledge into a unitary system of relations of superordination and subordination. Under a standpoint of judgment, Cassirer explains, the limited circle of facts, that is sensuously accessible, expands before our intellectual vision into a universal connection of phenomena according to natural law. 27 Here Cassirer intimates the frontiers of objectivity, that imagined sphere characterized by a universal order permitting exact reconstruction from any particular point of view. While the noble dream of such rigorous objectivity is well a thing of the past, it is nevertheless important to underscore two things. 28 First, the transformation of what Cassirer and Panofsky refer to as the chaos of sensuous particulars into the cosmos of a system of thought begins with the conjecture of a unified system to which such elements belong. The imagining of a unified system serves as a Kantian regulative idea, an idea we must assume in order to facilitate our understanding of objects in the first place. 29 Serving as an imaginary focus, the hypothetical idea of unity not only establishes the continuity of experience, it also guides the process of inquiry from immediate experience to reflection, from consciousness of uniformity to consciousness of necessary connection. Motivating the shift in point of view, judgment creates a meaningful set of propositions which are then tested. 30 What Cassirer describes as the highest criterion of science, namely unity and completeness in the systematic construction of experience, is achieved when universal premises are determined. When these universal concepts, principles, or laws are established, then all propositions resolve themselves into pure correlations within a unified field of inquiry. The goal of investigation is therefore not the gathering of a quantity of sensuous particulars or empirical observations, but the quality of the connection made through judgment, the limit of which would be that imagined frontier of objectivity where an individual judgment could be deemed universal. Second, as one moves toward the use of intellectual hypotheses, the object of analysis does not change. Rather, what shifts is one s vantage point relative to the object. 31 Divergent points of view on an object enable a plurality of different forms of expression that nonetheless have the object as their initial frame of reference. It is worth remarking that when Cassirer and Panofsky were writing, the natural sciences had rejected the Newtonian belief in absolute space and time in favor of the understanding of a space-time continuum. Einstein s paper on the special theory of relativity, published in 1905, marked the transition from the belief in an absolute system of coordinates to the understanding of the relative relation of space and time. 32 Granting the importance of such scientific discoveries, we may note the inherent reason why this shift in viewpoint

20 Chapter 1 is inevitable: because the content of consciousness always comes to us shaped or arranged in some manner, it is impossible to separate completely the processes of perception and thought. 33 As Kant had remarked in his first Critique, the productive imagination is an ingredient of every possible perception. Indeed, a mutual relation exists between perceptual facts and one s thinking about them, a state of affairs felicitously described by Goethe in his well-known maxim Every fact is already theory. 34 Panofsky cites Goethe s maxim in his 1915 book on Dürer s art theory. 35 If, as Panofsky and Wind suggest, the stubborn particularity of aesthetic phenomena presents special challenges for art history, aesthetic phenomena are nonetheless the starting points of investigation for systematic art history. This is not the case merely because works of art are the objects of art history. As the subject of art history, works of art are the starting points of theoretical investigation. To be sure, the subjective, objective, and transcendental viewpoints place the objects of experience into different logical spheres. A fundamental relation exists between these points of view, however: although each point of view is distinct, as Kant and Goethe suggest, they are also interrelated. Paraphrasing Kant s famous phrase, Panofsky notes how without objects, art-theoretical concepts are empty; without concepts, art-historical objects are blind. 36 Like the scientific experiment, the investigation of what Panofsky terms artistic problems is an inherently circular process involving the object and one s thinking about it. As Panofsky indicates, scientific art history requires two points of view: a view of the object and a vantage point beyond the object. In his 1920 essay The Concept of Artistic Volition ( Das Begriff des Kunstwollens ), the author commences by addressing the particularity of art history, as well as the need for a theoretical point of view on the field of investigation. It is the curse and the blessing of the academic study of art [Kunstwissenschaft] that its objects necessarily demand consideration from other than a purely historical point of view. A purely historical study, whether it proceeds from the history of form or the history of content, never explains the work of art as a phenomenon except in terms of other phenomena. Historical study does not draw on a higher source of perception: to explain the artistic production of a particular artist within the framework of his time (or in light of his individual artistic character), it traces a particular representation iconographically, or a particular formal complex according to a history of types, or even tries to determine if such a complex is derived from any particular influence at all. This means that each real phenomenon to be investigated is referred to all the others within the whole complex: their ab-

Panofsky s Early Theoretical Essays 21 solute locus and significance is not determined by a fixed Archimedean point outside their essential nature. Even the longest developmental series represents only lines which must have their starting and finishing points within such a purely historical nexus.... Artistic activity, however, distinguishes itself from general historical activity (and in this sense is like perception) in that its productions represent not the expressions of subjects but the informing of materials, not the given events but the results. Thus in considering art we are faced with the demand (which in the field of philosophy is satisfied by epistemology) for a principle of explanation by which the artistic phenomenon can be recognized not only by ever further references to other phenomena within its historical sphere but also by a consciousness which penetrates the sphere of its empirical existence. 37 The transformation of the object from aesthetic phenomenon to historical work of art requires one to connect images with their history. As Panofsky indicates, relating these historical objects to each other is then a matter of finding the uniformities among them and of forming classes or types of objects based on certain common attributes a process generally known as finding the category and style of the work of art. Thus related, heterogeneous objects become homogeneous series of objects organized according to certain sets of structural relations. Panofsky makes clear, however, that this procedure only goes so far. The demand... for a principle of explanation by which the artistic phenomenon can be recognized... by a consciousness which penetrates the sphere of its empirical existence implies the new point of view required for the correlation of artistic phenomena into a systematic art history. This move away from mere seeing toward the abstraction of the object necessary for scientific knowledge arises from the desire to reduce the structural relations binding works of art together to a more fundamental principle of explanation that would determine the whole sphere of aesthetic phenomena from a transcendental, rather than an empirical or objective vantage point. Noting the curse and blessing of the academic study of art, Panofsky therefore demands that we seek to answer two questions simultaneously: what is art? and what are the conditions of a systematic art history? Examining the nature of the foundations of recent art history, in particular the methods put forth by Wölfflin and Riegl, Panofsky s early theoretical essays ponder the conditions of possibility of a scientific art history. In what ways does art history account for the empirical, the objective, and the transcendental points of view within a unified field of inquiry? I will argue that Panofsky s early essays engage seeing, representing, and knowing by demonstrating how a theory of style might compose perception, representation in the form of a work of art, and historical

22 Chapter 1 knowledge in the guise of a history of style. In this way, Panofsky s theory of style accounts for the empirical, the objective, and the transcendental points of view just as it reveals something of the underlying principles comprising and correlating a systematic art history. Chaos, Cosmos, and Correlation Published in 1915, Panofsky s The Problem of Style in the Visual Arts responds to Heinrich Wölfflin s (1864 1945) December 1911 lecture to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. 38 Panofsky begins his essay by registering an inconsistency at the heart of Wölfflin s own system: Every style, so Wölfflin begins, doubtless has a particular expressive content; in the style of the Gothic or the Italian Renaissance are reflected a mood of the time and a way of life, and in the lines of Raphael there appear his personal characteristics. For Wölfflin, then, the essence of style consists in not only what is said but how it is said. Curiously enough, however, as Wölfflin moves from the consideration of individual works of art to the art of a historical period, expression recedes in value. That every artist of the sixteenth century, be he Raphael or Dürer, employs line rather than the painterly mark as the essential means of expression no longer depends on what one could call mentality, spirit, temperament or mood, Wölfflin asserts, but rather on a general form of seeing and representation that may be interpreted solely as visual possibilities. Wölfflin, then, distinguishes two different roots of style: an expressive, interpretative capacity for meaningful content on the one hand, and a psychologically meaningless form of seeing on the other. 39 Because style is here based on a double root, the concepts and categories of Wölfflin s entire system are themselves divided into two fundamentally different groups, not the least of which is the separation of form and content. 40 Can form be defined merely as a general concept of representation, and so be categorically distinguished from the expressive content of particular representational forms, as Wölfflin implies in his double root of style? 41 Is the eye merely an organic, unpsychological instrument, as Wölfflin claims? Can we fundamentally separate the relation of the eye and the world from the relation of the psyche (Seele) and the world? 42 As they stand, Wölfflin s categories merely describe the style of an artist or historical period; they do not explain why a work of art has style in the first place. Whereas Wölfflin s five conceptual pairs describe how Renaissance and Baroque paintings are composed, and provide us with a formal vocabulary with which to describe these images, Panofsky s 1915 essay seeks to explain why representation is expressive.

Panofsky s Early Theoretical Essays 23 Under the guise of taking Wölfflin to task for his double root of style, Panofsky charts a correlation between seeing and meaning on the one hand and form and content on the other hand. For Panofsky, the cluster of concepts that denote seeing the act of seeing, the eye, and the optical remain mechanistic and empty of connotation when these are understood only literally. 43 Endeavoring to provide seeing, the eye, and the optical with figurative meaning, which is to say with the capacity for expression, Panofsky stresses the role of the psyche (Seele). Understood variously as the site of feeling, temperament, and turn of mind, the Seele lends expressive content to what the eye sees, as it organizes what is seen into meaningful content. In this sense, Seele is considered a priori: the psyche is not inherent in any given content but presupposed as a method of ordering contents. Stressing the inner dimension that provides the empty container of the eye with the capacity for content and individual expression, Panofsky demonstrates the combined role of representation and expression in perceptual experience. According to Panofsky, then, style does not have two independent roots but one root with two stems. 44 The root of style is that art is itself a shaping of materials. Hence, a will to form or expression is the fundamental principle of style. This fundamental principle serves to distinguish the academic study of art from the other disciplines. Style has two stems because general forms of representation and individual expressive content interact in the shaping of materials. If style is dependent on the interaction of the general and the particular, then this interaction implies the negotiation of two points of view. Instead of conceiving form and content as two separate, irreducible concepts, Panofsky sets general form and content in a dialectical relation mediated by the psyche (Seele). 45 This dialectic, moreover, both explains and creates the problem of style: if an understanding of the interaction of the eye and Seele is essential to activate the category of style and to provide it with conceptual value, then this very interaction is responsible for the multiplicity and heterogeneity of individual forms. Artists, Panofsky contends, work within and shape general stylistic categories: artists choose between linear and painterly just as they paint in a style that might be characterized as linear or painterly. 46 As a consequence, perception, expression, and representation must be joined in the concept of style just as they are joined in the creation of a work of art. Unlike Wölfflin, then, for Panofsky a single work of art and the art of a period are allied as manifestations of an a priori will to form and expression. 47 If the dialectical interaction of general categories of representation and individual expressive content make for seemingly endless resolutions to what Panofsky terms artistic problems, it is important to un-

24 Chapter 1 derscore how general categories serve our understanding of style in the first place. Employing a musical analogy, Panofsky notes that it is precisely because all fugues are fugues that each can exhibit such varied individual expression; conversely, one can distinguish a passage in a sonata movement only because it is a sonata, with the result that even if it were possible for this passage to reach the greatest possible resemblance in theme, tempo, and modulation to that of a fugue, these two could never be absolutely identical. 48 Particular forms gain meaning only in relation to general forms or categories, since it is the mapping of the general that allows the historian of art or music to understand the refinements of, and variations in, a specific form. The composition of Panofsky s 1915 essay is itself musical in form. Its theme is the problem of style, and the variations on this theme are the dialectical relations between the individual psyche and the world, on the one hand, and the will to expression and the general forms of representation, on the other. As in his musical examples, Panofsky provides a demonstration of how two images with the same form have different content, just as two images with different content have the same form an epistemological condition beautifully articulated later, incidentally, in Jorge Luis Borges s story of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. 49 Here we might note how the dialectical interaction of general and particular that gives us the category of style is itself based on comparison: it is only by reference to a general category that we might be able to recognize a new passage of music or a new work of art; likewise, it is only because musical passages and artworks relate to a general category that we are able to appreciate such fine distinctions among them. Taking this a bit further, it becomes apparent that an entirely unique object would remain stranded outside the classificatory system of art history unless this object were made knowable through a process of comparison with what is known. 50 While artistic phenomena are prized for their originality, it is useful to consider how, in terms of a history of art, originality itself is subjected to the limiting structure of general stylistic categories. Wölfflin s own use of the comparative method in his Fundamental Principles of Art History has been rightly criticized. 51 It is nonetheless worth noting that if style is a basic principle and a distinguishing feature of the academic study of art, then it is not without coincidence that the comparative method would itself be a fundamental feature of the history of art. 52 On this account, dual slide projection could be considered as art history s complementary technological protocol. 53 Correlating the empirical and the objective points of view in a single principle of style, Panofsky accounts for the possibility of form and meaning just as he demonstrates how form and content come together in the

Panofsky s Early Theoretical Essays 25 expression of meaning. If, like Wölfflin, one considers seeing, the eye, and the optical too literally, they remain colorless concepts analogous to the empty container of the eye in Panofsky s essay. Like the dialectical relation between the eye and the psyche, Wölfflin s general categories obtain their full value only when they are set in a dynamic relation with particular, actual forms. While Panofsky sets the general and the particular in dialectical relation, he nevertheless distinguishes the general from the particular. Whereas Wölfflin relates works of art to a category of style such as linear or painterly, Panofsky correlates the style of the work of art to the fundamental principle of style itself, and, in doing so, to the epistemological bases of art history. In this way, specific works of art can be ordered into a system of categories which themselves are based on a general possibility of representation. 54 Operating like an epistemologist, Panofsky is here not concerned with the empirical subject, understood as either the artist or the viewing subject, but with art itself, and more precisely, with what is harbored within the work of art. 55 Like Wölfflin, Panofsky trains his sights on the work rather than on the maker. Unlike Wölfflin, however, whom he criticizes for defining seeing, the eye, and the optical too literally, Panofsky finds the traces of the maker in the work the psyche, after all, lends individual temperament and feeling to the organ of the eye. And yet, what Panofsky terms the psyche in the 1915 essay is considered more an a priori principle than an individual expressive element per se. Though Panofsky binds style to a single a priori principle, he is, in other words, not as interested in the composition of Seele so much as in how it operates. In this way he neatly avoids the thorny task of defining messy terms like temperament or feeling. Instead, he focuses on the apparently more important task of delineating the conceptual value of a unitary principle of style. Operating like an epistemologist, moreover, Panofsky can assume the role of interpreter, discovering meaning otherwise lost on those whose gaze lies too near spatially or temporally to the object of study. From this vantage point he is able to regard what lies within the object: an involuntary gesture, without a trace of expressive intention, can be eminently expressive, he suggests in a footnote. 56 What remains in germ, expressed as it is in a footnote to the 1915 essay, is a prolepsis the trace of a future, iconographic method. Forms, traces, clues: Panofsky s search for meaning in an image has been likened to the practice of the medical doctor and the sleuth. 57 Yet it is precisely in validating the role of the present-day interpreter over the artist s own interpretations of his or her work, or the reactions to this work by the artist s contemporaries, that Panofsky hopes to determine the fundamental concepts of a system-

26 Chapter 1 atic art history. Still, Panofsky presumes the a priori nature of his most important critical term, Seele, just as he fails to determine this term critically so much, we might say, for the moves of the epistemologist. Notwithstanding his criticisms, Panofsky praises Wölfflin for providing art history with general categories such as linear, painterly, and so forth. The first task of art history must be the discovery, elaboration, and refinement of these categories, he argues, for only in this way can art history achieve systematicity and disciplinary coherence. 58 Although he succeeds in offering an accounting of Wölfflin s five conceptual pairs, Panofsky concludes by saying that a complete explanation is not possible since the causality of Wölfflin s categories cannot be determined. Yet even if it is not possible for scientific knowledge to delineate the historical and psychological causes of the general forms of artistic representation (a task, it would seem, best suited for the interpretations of the art historian), binding Wölfflin s style into a single root enables Panofsky to correlate concepts of form and content, representation and expression, and with them the stylistic categories, into one unified system. Panofsky contends that it is Alois Riegl (1858 1905) who has come furthest in the creation and use of such fundamental concepts. 59 In The Concept of Artistic Volition, an essay of 1920, the author suggests that Riegl s concept of artistic volition, the Kunstwollen, which encompasses both a will to form and the expressive features of the artwork itself, may account for immanent meaning and the history of that meaning as this is expressed in works of art. 60 As his 1915 essay on Wölfflin sought to correlate form and content, so here Panofsky understands formal and imitative elements as different manifestations of a common fundamental tendency. 61 Acknowledging that an understanding of the Kunstwollen can easily slide into psychological volition, and into the equally common and parallel concept of artistic intention, Panofsky is keen to secure artistic volition as a first principle. 62 He therefore avoids the use of artistic volition in modern aesthetics, since from this viewpoint we are told more about the psychology of the beholder making the judgment than about the work of art itself. 63 He likewise cautions the reader against a consideration of the Kunstwollen as the historically genetic volition of the artist s time, as this point of view merely describes how works of art are represented in contemporary criticism. Instead, Panofsky focuses on an epistemological investigation of artistic volition, since only such a fundamental understanding of the Kunstwollen will permit knowledge of immanent meaning. 64 Considering artistic volition as a first principle is a matter of perspective. In order to illustrate this point Panofsky offers a comparison from epistemology: If I take any judgmental proposition for example,

Panofsky s Early Theoretical Essays 27 the one made famous by Kant s Prolegomena: the air is elastic as given, then I can look at it from many points of view, he writes. Panofsky conveys the substance of the historical, psychological, grammatical, and logical viewpoints of this proposition. He then arrives at the importance of the comparison for his own argument. It is worth quoting at length. Finally, I can ask whether an analytical or synthetic judgment, a judgment of experience or a judgment of perception, is expressed in it. In asking this last, transcendental-philosophical question of it, something is revealed that I would call the epistemological essence of the proposition: that which is in it as purely cognitive content apart from its formal logical structure and its psychological prehistory, indeed apart from what the person making the judgment meant himself. I can determine that, as it stands, the proposition the air is elastic merely contains a judgment in which perceptions are found only in their ordinary relationship, that is, the perceptions are linked only through their simultaneous life in an individual consciousness, not by the pure cognitive concept of causality in consciousness in general. While I determine this I arrive at the judgment that the proposition first of all does not contain a judgment of experience but merely a judgment of perception. Its validity is that of a statement about the actual nexus of ideas of air and elasticity in the thinking self making the judgment, not that of an objective, universally valid law, according to which the one view necessarily conditions the other. A validity of this latter sort would, on the contrary, only befit the proposition if we had found that, instead of being linked to ties of psychological coexistence, the two ideas (air and elasticity) had been causally linked into a unity of experience. 65 Drawing on Kant s distinction between judgments of perception, which rest on empirical judgments, and judgments of experience, which require hypothetical judgments, Panofsky reinforces his earlier claim that only an epistemological point of view will reveal the immanent meaning of artistic phenomena. In terms of Kant s proposition, Panofsky neatly demonstrates that judgments of perception are at best capable of determining qualities of elasticity and air, and their casual, or historical, relation to each other. While judgments of perception indicate what I can expect based on my experience of perceiving the world, judgments of experience inquire into consciousness in general, with the aim of discovering the conditions of possibility of cognition itself. A judgment of experience of this same proposition would therefore demonstrate that air and elasticity are related through an objective, universally valid law, which would render them causally linked into a unity of experience. Panofsky turns from epistemology to artistic volition in the next paragraph, in which he attempts to explain how we might relate artistic volition to a systematic art history.

28 Chapter 1 Let us now return to the question of the comprehension of artistic intention or volition. Just as a particular epistemological essence belonged to the proposition the air is elastic when it was considered in the light of causality (and only thus), so an immanent meaning can be discovered in the objects of aesthetics in more widely or more narrowly, epochally, regionally, or individually limited artistic phenomena. Thus artistic volition is no longer revealed in only a psychological but also in a transcendental/ philosophical sense. This is so if these objects are considered not in relationship to something outside themselves (historical circumstances, psychological prehistory, stylistic analogies) but exclusively in relation to their own being. They must be considered again, however, in the light of standards of determination that, with the force of a priori basic principles, refer not to the phenomenon itself but to the conditions of its existence and it being thus. 66 Comprehending a work of art under a number of possible concepts, such as time, place, or artist, judgments of perception help us recognize the work of art as belonging to a particular time, region, or artist s oeuvre. Helpful as this might be for the building up of stylistic categories and the understanding of historical periods, these judgments are made by relating the work to something outside its essential nature. A judgment of experience of artistic volition, in contrast, would demonstrate the innermost sense of the work of art. As Panofsky suggests, determining the a priori principles of artistic volition not only necessitates our answering the question, what is art? but also the condition of its existence and its being thus. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant claimed space and time as forms of pure intuition (reine Anschauung), that is to say, as a priori preconditions of experience. Panofsky, through his own admission, does not have a ready answer for what might be analogous forms for artistic volition. As preconditions for cognition, Kantian categories of space and time render causality possible. In terms of art history, categories of space and time serve to locate objects within a stream of time rather than account for causality per se. As Panofsky indicates, we must assume the possibility of comprehending the artistic phenomenon as a unity in order to carry out our investigation of it from an epistemological point of view. 67 Yet even in presupposing this much, we cannot critically determine causality for artistic phenomena. Whereas what Panofsky calls a psychological or historically genetic view of artistic volition might lead us to conjecture psychological or historical causes for the sensuous appearance of works of art, these judgments can never determine artistic volition in its innermost sense. Yet if scientific art history is predicated on establishing

Panofsky s Early Theoretical Essays 29 the a priori principles of works of art, and on correlating these with a system of categories, then where are we left? Instead of continuing with his epistemological analysis, Panofsky concludes his 1920 essay by reintroducing the necessity of documents as heuristic aids for an interpretation of meaning. As heuristic aids, documents serve to correct false suppositions regarding the meaning of a work of art. In this way, they lead the art historian increasingly closer to valid interpretations of meaning. Documents, Panofsky writes, are not then an immediate indication of the meaning itself; yet they are the source of those insights without which the grasp of meaning is, often enough, impossible. 68 Panofsky s turn toward an analysis of documents marks a shift in his essay from the consideration of immanent meaning to one of phenomenal understanding. 69 As such, this shift likewise marks a turn from a discussion of the meaning of artistic volition per se to the meaning of a work of art. 70 Although Panofsky does not determine artistic volition from an epistemological point of view in the 1920 essay, he nevertheless succeeds in distinguishing artistic volition from both the artist s volition and the volition of his time, and in demonstrating what would be necessary in order to secure artistic volition as a fundamental concept. Employing the concept of the Kunstwollen as a theoretical instrument, Panofsky demonstrates how an epistemological point of view opens up the deepest level of meaning in the work of art. To ask the philosophical-transcendental question of Riegl s Kunstwollen, he suggests, is to consider the concept in a way not possible for Riegl himself on account of his own historical position. 71 Panofsky s consideration of the Kunstwollen against the grain is nonetheless in keeping with the earlier art historian s own definition: for Riegl, too, the concept of artistic volition encompasses the sphere of the metaphysical and the historical particular. Yet unlike Riegl, who emphasizes both points of view in his definition and application of the Kunstwollen, Panofsky stresses the philosophical-transcendental connotations of Riegl s concept. 72 By taking the Kunstwollen as an a priori principle, Panofsky correlates Riegl s metaphysical and historical senses of the concept into one unitary sense or immanent meaning. In this way he shows us how we might arrive at a principle of artistic volition that precedes the particular stylistic qualities or modes of representation in works of art themselves. In keeping with his earlier essay on Wölfflin, Panofsky does not define the substance of the Kunstwollen. Instead, he secures the concept of artistic volition in a purely critical manner by offering a critically undefined concept of artistic volition to art history as its own fundamental concept. 73

30 Chapter 1 In the 1925 essay, On the Relation of Art History to Art Theory, which bears the subtitle A Contribution to the Discussion of the Possibility of Fundamental Concepts for Systematic Art History ( Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie. Ein Beitrag zu der Erörterung über die Möglichkeit kunstwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe ), Panofsky offers a more detailed accounting of how a principle of style operates in art history, art theory, and systematic art history (Kunstwissenschaft). 74 Making a careful distinction for the first time between the activities of atheoretical and theoretical art history, the author ventures a critical articulation of the deepest level of meaning of aesthetic phenomena. Not surprisingly, this fundamental level is correlated in his schema with a unitary principle of style, and so with the register of disciplinary coherence. In his earlier writings Panofsky aimed to correlate form and content into a unitary principle of style and to secure Riegl s concept of artistic volition as a fundamental concept. In this most recent essay he extends his earlier investigations by formulating them into a unified system. In the 1925 essay, Panofsky therefore translates Riegl s concept of artistic volition into a will to form (Formwillen), which is likewise referred to as a principle of style (Stilprinzip). As in his critique of Wölfflin, so here Panofsky defines a principle of style as the necessary interaction and balance of two opposing principles. Whereas Wölfflin s stylistic categories merely account for the visual solutions of artistic problems, in this essay Panofsky presents the originary impetus for the problem of form and style. 75 By accounting for the problem of style, however, Panofsky does not merely extend his earlier critique of Wölfflin. Defining a fundamental principle of style that allows for seemingly infinite possibilities of artistic form and content, Panofsky also implies that this manifold of artistic possibility might be inappropriately constricted by Wölfflin s stylistic categories. Shortly into the essay Panofsky presents the accompanying table of the conceptual system of scientific art history. 76 Instead of critically deducing this table and showing its completeness and use value from a methodological point of view, Panofsky seeks more modestly to demonstrate how the characteristic artistic problems presented in visual and architectural creations are structurally related to the fundamental concepts of a systematic art history. Because different logical categories are unified by the author under the same system of explanation, the facts of art are neither stranded nor inert; instead, they become values in a system of relations. As we shall see, Panofsky presents a cosmos of culture as different but complementary points of view for considering the same phenomenon. 77